Last week, my friend Zack challenged me to a game of table shuffleboard. I had never played before, but it looked simple enough. Two players take turns sliding weights down a fifteen foot wooden table covered in tiny silicone beads. The object of the game is to get your weight to stop in one of the sections near the end of the table. The closer you get to the end, the more points you receive.
Just slide the weight down the board so it stops near the end. Sounds simple enough, right? But as we started playing I soon discovered that what looked relatively easy was actually incredibly hard.
In forty minutes of playing the game, I don’t think I had more than ten weights stay on the playing surface. It was incredibly frustrating. I kept trying different things, but it was quickly apparent this was the type of thing that could only be learned through repeated practice.
Sometimes the simplest sounding things turn out to be the most difficult to do.
I shared in my last post that God’s primary plan for our lives is that we seek him with our entire being. This is an echo of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 22:37, that the greatest commandment is to love God and your neighbor. All we have to do is “Love God and Love People.” However, what can be reduced to a relatively simple statement is in fact quite difficult to do. What does it mean to love God with all of our heart, mind, and strength?
Loving God with our entire being involves using everything that we have– our mind, understanding, gifts, talents, energy time and resources– in pursuit of knowing him and being obedient to him.
Practically, part of this is giving time and attention to disciplines that result in growing our relationship with Jesus. The discipline of “daily devotions” has always been tough for me. This is certainly related to my own struggle with self-discipline, but the encouragement to daily “read your bible and pray” is considerably more strenuous than it sounds.
Reading scripture daily is a discipline that takes some serious initial effort to develop. If you do not currently have some type of reading plan, the YouVersion Bible App has been incredibly helpful to me. They have a number of great reading plans and devotionals. It is also possible to set reminders to keep yourself from forgetting. Their plans are available here.
The discipline of prayer has always been much more challenging to me. Reading is easier. It is objective. I can read a text and consider how it may impact my life. Prayer feels more subjective. It requires a lot of patience. And scheduling time to pray has always felt a little inauthentic to me. But despite my best intentions I have found that if I do not plan to do it, it does not happen.
I’ve been reflecting this week on a parable in Luke 11. Jesus teaches the disciples about the importance of persistently seeking God in prayer.
In the parable, a traveler has just arrived at his friend’s house from a long journey in the middle of the night. The friend didn’t expect him because there was no way for him to pick up a phone and let him know precisely when he would arrive.
After several full nights walking in the desert the traveler is famished! The friend wants to serve him something to eat, but he has run out of his daily supply of bread he had cooked earlier in the day. He considers making fresh bread, but it would take hours to start a fire and bake it. Feeling desperate, he goes to his neighbor’s house and ask for some of his leftover bread.
He calls from the porch, “Neighbor, my friend has just arrived on a long journey and I am out of bread. Can I please have some of your leftovers from today?” The neighbor calls back from his small one room house, “Go away! I have the door locked and my children are all asleep with me here in bed. It is too inconvenient for me to get up. If I get up and unbolt the door I’ll wake all of my children.”
And then Jesus says “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is your neighbor, because of your persistent knocking he will get up and give you whatever you need. So I tell you, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”
And he goes on to say, “Which of you fathers would give your son a snake when he asked for a fish, or a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then as human fathers marked by a sinful nature know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Jesus says we should seek him with persistence like the man knocking on his neighbor’s door. We are to keep doing it until he answers.
We seek the presence of Jesus because it changes us. It changes our desires. It changes the way we see other people. It empowers us to be God’s hands and feet in our world. It is what he asks us to do.
Prayer is an activity that can feel awkward at first. It certainly has at times for me. But Jesus says we are to keep knocking… and knocking… and knocking. With repeated practice over time it starts to feel more natural.
If you have been a Christian for six months or forty years, Jesus asks you to knock. His plan for our lives is that we persistently seek him. He promises that if we do seek him, we will find him.
I invite all of you reading this to a join me in a challenge this week. Schedule thirty minutes a day just to seek him. Get in a quiet place, maybe turn on some instrumental music and place all of your attention on him. Ask that his Holy Spirit would come and work on healing your wounds. Ask him to come and empower you to love the difficult people you interact with everyday. Ask him to help you understand the scripture as you read it and apply it to your life. Take a moment and surrender all of you concerns and anxiety before him. Then sit in the quiet. Listen. Expect him to meet you.
If you’re not accustomed to doing so, it could feel uncomfortable at first. Jesus says, “keep knocking.” Time may seem to drag on a bit. Keep knocking. You will begin to remember all of the things you need to do later on in the day. When those things come up in your mind, write them down briefly and keep knocking.
God’s primary purpose for our lives is that we seek him with everything that we have. If our desire is to fulfill God’s plan for our lives we must begin by daily spending time seeking the presence of Jesus and reading his Word.
May each of us have a special grace to encounter Jesus this week as we set aside time to persistently seek him.
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“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 29:12-14 ESV).
Brandon Morgan 